Join Chuck Marohn and Megan Wooley-Ousdahl, AICP, Senior Planner at Toole Design to discuss the right and wrong ways to engage a community.
Throw away the surveys. Cancel the public forums. Get rid of the dot stickers and poster board. It’s time for community engagement processes that truly work. It’s time to build our communities in a way that responds to the needs of our neighbors, not checks a box in a government manual. Join this presentation for an exploration of community engagement processes that actually listen to residents—without demanding they show up to yet another meeting. You’ll leave with ideas and examples for how to implement these processes in your city or town.
Charles Marohn - known as "Chuck" to friends and colleagues - is the Founder and President of Strong Towns and the author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. He is a Professional Engineer (PE) licensed in the State of Minnesota and a land use planner with two decades of experience. He holds a bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning, both from the University of Minnesota.
Marohn is also the lead author of Thoughts on Building Strong Towns — Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3 — as well as the author of A World Class Transportation System. He hosts the Strong Towns Podcast and is a primary writer for Strong Towns’ web content. He has presented Strong Towns concepts in hundreds of cities and towns across North America. He is featured in the documentary film Owned: A Tale of Two Americans, and was named one of the 10 Most Influential Urbanists of all time by Planetizen.
Megan Wooley-Ousdahl is a Senior Planner at Toole Design, an active transportation planning, engineering, and landscape architecture firm. She enjoys developing creative and dynamic community engagement that resonates. Megan has led numerous engagement exercises for both large cities and small towns, and she is skilled at unscrambling planning concepts. Her goal is to make urban and rural planning easy for community members to understand so that they can be more engaged, and communities can better facilitate conversations about their future.